Graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA is one of the leading proponents of virtual reality (VR), supporting the industry through its hardware and software businesses. Today the company has made two announcements, the first – in collaboration with Amazon Lumberyard and SpeedTree – is for the ORCA (Open Research Content Archive), while the second is for its open-source real-time rendering research software framework Falcor.
ORCA is a free, open library of professionally-created 3D assets assets donated by industry leaders for computer graphics researchers. This will allow creators to utilise high-quality 3D content without the worry of copyright restrictions.
“ORCA is the first step in bringing production-quality assets to the research community. We call upon other companies, especially in the game and film industry, to join us in contributing to this library. Researchers inventing algorithms using the rich 3D assets in ORCA will tackle entirely new problems, create battle-tested algorithms ready for production, and move the entire field ahead faster,” said Hao Chen, Technical Director of Amazon Lumberyard in a statement.
Continuing NVIDIA’s support of the research community a new version of Falcor is being rolled out, so that it now supports both DirectX 12 and Vulkan graphics APIs, the latter of which is being used to improve mobile visuals including that of VR.
Falcor provides support for ORCA assets with some key features including a physically-based material and lighting system, a library of modern graphics techniques, support for static animation and skinned meshes and stereo rendering using OpenVR.
These announcements have come whilst NVIDIA is currently at SIGGRAPH 2017 which has already seen some interesting news released. OptiTrack is showcasing its latest tracking technology for VR arcades that uses pucks on a players hands and feet to fully detect their movements and show them to other players. While HP has unveiled the Z VR Backpack PC which comes with a docking station for multi VR use scenarios.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of NVIDIA, reporting back with the latest VR developments.
via Mint VR